| NEC VERSA P/75 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The NEC Versa P was the final version of the 1st generation NEC Versa released. It came out sometime at the beginning of 1995 and was aimed at a lower price point than previous generations, costing around $2400 on average. It's big selling points were the HC model with it's 800x600 pixel color active matrix display, and SoundBlaster comaptible sound card, as well as the Pentium 75MHz CPU under the hood. It managed to soldier on long enough to overlap the 2000/4000/6000 series laptops a little bit but was discontinued sometime in 1996.
The Versa P was derided somewhat in most computer magazines for it's "outdated" or "aging" design, as it used a similar case design to the 486-based Versa models that came out just a short time before. Performance is just marginally better than a Versa M, and taking one apart, it seems that there was some custom intel Silicon used because the CPU chip almost looks like a bare wafer soldered to the board rather than a full on ceramic or plastic SMD or PGA chip like older laptops. Much of this poor performance is because it really is just a Versa M-series with a SoundBlaster compatible sound card and a Pentium Processor as the rest of the circuit seemed to remain much the same. Model#s were as follows...
PERFORMANCE, SPECS, COMMON INFORMATION FROM IT'S DAY The Versa P/75 was the last hurrah for the original Versa line. While it shares the same general design as all previous models on the platform, they had to alter the platform a little bit to accomodate the Pentium CPU. That said, when it came out in early 1995 it was already seen as a "has been" or "aging platform" by the press. While aesthetically this is easy to see, it's also easy to tell if you've ever used a Versa P/75. I consider 1995 the year that I.T. really started going downhill due to consumertards and wannabe-nerds thinking bigger numbers and new marketing names = better product. That was part of the Versa P/75's downfall. It was basically a NEC VErsa M/75 with a Pentium CPU and a ESS488 SoundBlaster Compatible sound card grafted onto it - everything else is EXACTLY like the M/75 - same Cirrus PCMCIA chipset, same C&T 65545 graphics chipset, same screen options as regular non-true color M/75, same hard disk options, same memory options - it's pretty much the same computer with a marginally faster CPU and a somewhat weakened case to accomodate more airflow for the Pentium CPU (which really did not need it anyway). In a time when we were just starting to see 10+" LCD Panels, Lithium Ion batteries, and Cardbus 32-bit slots, here what could either be considered a bus castrated Pentium 75, or a 486 DX4 with a Pentium 75 chip grafted onto the motherboard. The P/75 I reckon was NEC's way of buying some time while they finished up their new 2000/4000/6000 series that was entirely Pentium Based except the bottom two 2000 models (the 2000C and 2000D which were 486 DX4-75 models). That said, they did have to alter a lot internally. Gone is the daughtercard for a true color model, replaced now by a different pin header arrangement for a discreet proprietary sound card. The CPU board is a new design featuring a special version of the Pentium 75 MHz cpu on it that has it's own heat-pipe assembly that snakes around the case and seems to exhaust underneath the power management board section of the mainboard - replacing one screw for the power board itself with a coarse thread screw staked into the plastic shell, rather than the previous method where said screw would come through the bottom of the case, and grab onto the keyboard from the bottom - providing some support to the "Sandwhich" construction of this laptop. This wekened the structure and made it possible. Further criticizm carried over from the M/75 in the form of battery life and the higher resoolution 800x600 LCD panel, which seemed to be the most common screen option on the P/75. Apparently this reduced battery life to under 2 hours and a lot of people did not like this when there were other portable workstations that could run for twice as long. This was also an insult in a way to the original design because the original Ultralite could go up to eight hours like the original 1988 Ultralite on a single charge with a mono display and no additional hardware added. But that was 1993, this was 2 years later, and the ladnscape of I.T. had changed drastically since then. When the Ultralite Versa was intrdouced in 1993, a color laptop computer with an active matrix screen was somewhat of a luxury, and one with PCMCIA-derived video circuitry like the Versa was cutting edge. But in 1995, a "cutting edge" laptop warranting NEC's price tag would have been a 10.5" screen active matrix color laptop with the same resoultion, SoundBlaster compatible sound, a built in modem, Lithium Ion batteries, and 32-bit Cardbus slots - vs the NEC P/75's VESA Local Bus circuits carried over from the 486 models, 16-bit Type II PCMCIA Card slots, and limited color pallet. As such, the Versa P/75 fell by the wayside in favor of it's later replacements.MODERN PERFORMANCE, RELIABILITY, AND DURABILITY Today, the P/75 is kind of a forgotten footnote from a time of massive change - 1995 was one of the biggest changes in the computer industry. Before 1995, we all ran WIndows 3.1 on PC's, on top of MS-DOS. Internet was optional, most people who used it were scientists, scholars, or businesspeople, and if you were gaming on a PC, it most likely would be a desktop because laptops were silly expensive. Even the P/75 being a late-stage use-em-up of the Versa still cost nearly $2000 in a base configuration retail. That said the P/75, assuming the example you find is solid physically, is actually one of the better choices for vintage DOS and Windows 9x retrogaming and retrocomputing. That said, it won't be a screaming Quake machine, but it can do alright in Quake or older. It's not going to run Half Life or Skyrim, but it'll do just find for most DOS stuff. You have to remmebe,r the Versa P/75 pre-dated Windows 95 by several months and almost all advertising for it shows it running Excel in Windows 3.11. It was kind of designed to be te "F-350 Super Duty" of the Versa line, but it kind of falls on it's face in that it's still just a P75 machine tacked onto 486 underpinnings. Performance compared to a Versa M/75 with the same general specifications is almost identical. Sure, the P/75 is SLIGHTLY faster, but not enough to really make that much of a difference in the real world. While you do have the power of the Pentium CPU, it's held back by an aging 486-based platform. Kind of an odd case of "early adopter" syndrome. Do I reccommend it - well, yeah, if the case is holding up well. That said though, another thing going against it is the screen, but this is easily remedied by buying an earlier Versa with the 640x480 TFT color panel and putting that on the Versa P, with one of the versions just marked" Versa" for the Versa E-series being the best ones you can find. But overall, I find in benchmarks, the P75 does not really show that much more real world performance than an M/75, not enough to matter in my book. Later builds tried to solve some eyestrain issues with the tiny graphics on the tiny screen by bumping it up to 10.5" - but this was just to tide things over until the 2000/4000/6000 models with better screens could be released.COMMON ISSUES The P/75's #1 biggest problem is the plastic, and on this model, because of the restructuring of the design to accomodate the cooling system for the Pentium processor, the structure has been weakened so much that that newer, more stable plastic is a little weak - especially a 1.5"x1.5" vent on the bottom beneath the power section that has a tendency to crack. Mine was cracked all the way across the front, with little gray crumbs falling out from all over inside. This structural integrity issue contributes to another problem, boards staying connected. I've had more problems with reseating boards on this version than any other one. Sometimes the sound card comes unseated and stops talking to the system, and sometimes the CPU board comes slightly loose, and then the CMOS settings are cleared and the machine forgets what it is. Kind of a major issue caused by the cracking plastic. Mine's all held together with baking soda, superglue, and packing tape and I still struggle with the BIOS and all the other stuff inside coming loose. |
